The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) brought to greater prominence a question that has long vexed Australian foreign policy-makers: could they avoid choosing between the US security alliance and Australia’s complementary economic ties with China? Given the immense political capital invested in the BRI by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it was perhaps inevitable that Australia – like many other countries – had to declare its position. By so doing, however, Australia was forced to reckon with an issue that pitted its security interests directly against its economic ones. This chapter traces Australia’s evolving position on the BRI from 2016 to 2020, its interrelated justifications for rejecting the BRI, and the political and economic consequences of the decision. We show that debate over the BRI disrupted a longstanding consensus about the centrality of free trade and investment to Australian foreign economic policy. The BRI, we argue, signified a turning away from Australia’s previously enthusiastic support for global free trade to a more qualified security-sensitive approach.

Switzerland has concluded a free-trade agreement with China and, as such, it lends itself well to study the politics of preferential trade liberalization with China. We argue that the losers of trade in advanced democracies more strongly oppose North-South preferential trade agreements (PTAs), such as PTAs with China, than North-North PTAs. We also explore whether belief in compensatory welfare policies mitigates the uneven effects of preferential liberalization, arguing that such beliefs more strongly increase support for North-South than North-North PTAs among losers. We further argue that compared to passive/protective labor market policies, social activation policies less significantly increase support for North-South PTAs among losers. Lastly, we expect preferential liberalization involving countries with different levels of social standards (North-South PTAs) to drive a wedge between left- and right-leaning voters, more so than preferential liberalization involving trading partners with similar standards (North-North). Using representative survey data, including original survey questions probing opinions on the Sino-Swiss PTA of 2013 and the bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the EU, we find support for our expectations. Our analysis has implications for the backlash against globalization under Chinese influence.

When considering the question of China’s external economic relations during the Mao era, the dominant narrative in the literature underscores the following view: Mao’s China pursued a foreign economic policy that was autarkic, isolated from the global economy, and locked into a Soviet-inspired planned economy that provided limited incentives for economic interdependence with the outside world. For some, China’s isolation from the global economy was the result of its position in the Soviet bloc, which was “heavily biased against foreign trade,” and from its adoption of a centrally planned, socialist economic model that prohibited private interests from pursuing foreign investment or trade. For others, Mao-era policies of autarky were inspired by a form of xenophobia that stemmed from the country’s experience of Western predations during the nineteenth century, resulting in fear of economic dependence on foreign powers. Finally, others emphasize the role of Mao’s revolutionary ideology in explaining China’s isolation from the global economy; Mao’s tendency to view major international economic institutions and norms as counterrevolutionary and “hostile” to the Chinese state led him to disengage from international trade and other economic opportunities.